So, Dionysus was a Copy of Moses, may One Presume?

somewhere else : So, Dionysus was a Copy of Moses, may One Presume? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Historicity of Moses Revisited

Acharya S (a k a D. M. Murdock) does it again. And so presumable she will be doing for some time, I do not want her to stand uncontradicted though.

Here she quotes Voltaire, so the following is my quote of Voltaire via Acharya:*

The ancient poets have placed the birth of Bacchus in Egypt; he is exposed on the Nile and it is from that event that he is named Mises by the first Orpheus, which, in Egyptian, signifies "saved from the waters"… He is brought up near a mountain of Arabia called Nisa [Nysa], which is believed to be Mount Sinai. It is pretended that a goddess ordered him to go and destroy a barbarous nation and that he passed through the Red Sea on foot, with a multitude of men, women, and children. Another time the river Orontes suspended its waters right and left to let him pass, and the Hydaspes did the same. He commanded the sun to stand still; two luminous rays proceeded from his head. He made a fountain of wine spout up by striking the ground with his thyrsus, and engraved his laws on two tables of marble. He wanted only to have afflicted Egypt with ten plagues, to be the perfect copy of Moses.

OK. Possible. Let us take chronology. Dionysus is a Greek divinity so recent that Homer (c. 800 BC he wrote Iliad and Odyssey) does not know him. That is well after Moses. Time enough for the old Hebrews to remember him correctly and for Pagans to remember him wrong.

I have previously reasoned or guessed that Deukalion and Pyrrha (the Flood surviving childless old couple in Greek Mythology) are based on:
1) Noah and Family (Flood survivors)
2) Abraham and Sarah (a so far childless old couple when visited by three angels who announced also the coming destruction of Sodom)
3) Lot and two daughters (hospitable survivors of a disaster similar to the Flood, though geographically limited, and faced after being saved with some conundrum about how to repeople the world (in Genesis it is only an imagined conundrum, imagined by the two daughters who thought the world had been destroyed but for them: when they soaked their father drunk he made them pregnant with Moab and Ammon).

If Orpheus (supposing Orpheus the husband of Eurydice to be the one to whom Voltaire referred as to "the first Orpheus") said such things about Dionysus, he might have similarily been getting the story of Moses in a distorted fashion.

I think Pagans had a reason to distort the stories. Step one, they leave out things they do not want to believe. Step two, they put in things, preferrably from stories already known and which may well be true ones too, to fill the gaps in the story.

What is left out in the Deukalion and Pyrrha story? The Miracle of Sarah's pregnancy and the fact that Sodomy was the third and final of the Sins leading God to decide the destruction.

The first of these woud to a Pagan, used to judging hopes and fears after how things usually go, as a foolhardy miracle to hope for and a stupidity to believe in.

As to the second, since the time of Hercules (reputed a lover of Iolaus), Greeks had more and more been lenient on sodomy, if not in legislation at least in talking about peopple outside their own jurisdiction.

Now, Voltaire analysed himself that the one thing left out from the story of Dionysus, if a copy from that of Moses, are the ten plagues. Not quite left out though. Pentheus would in such a case echo the Pharao. But in the main yes.

Reason? Well, Moses had argued that the Pharao insulted the law of the one God whose chosen people the Israelites were (as the Catholics are today, by the way, though with other duties to those outside, since that is indeed for all nations).

Would that not have struck a false note with people who believed in many gods and in equal or nicely graduated degrees of favour by the gods?

And furthermore, the Israelites were described as being held as slaves: those being the chosen people might very well have struck a Pagan who believed slaves were such by nature or divine decision as very awkward to believe or accept.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou Library
St Carina and martyrdom of
Bishop Jón Arason (in 1541)
7 - XI - 2012

*Stellar House Publishing : The Moses-Dionysus Connection
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/moses-dionysus.html

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Appendix : Egyptian evidence for Moses

If above is correct, the Dionysus cult is, from Orpheus on a Thracian and from after Homer but before Hesiod a Greek independent testimony for the existance of Moses.

But would not Egyptian evidence be even better?

We might have exactly that. But first a piece of Chronology. Here I state that I believe Protestants to be wrong and Martyrologium Romanum to be right in Chronology. Now, Protestants would place the Exodus from Egypt in B.C. 1446, the Martyrology places it 1510 years before the birth of Christ. This means Moses striking the Egyptian Overseer to death was 1550 years before Christ.

Keep that in mind as we read following extract from the article I link to on that one.**

One of the last kings of the 12th dynasty was Sesostris III. His statues depict him as a cruel tyrant quite capable of inflicting harsh slavery on his subjects. His son was Amenemhet III, who seems to have been an equally disagreeable character. He probably ruled for 46 years, and Moses would have been born near the beginning of his reign.

Amenemhet III may have had one son, known as Amenemhet IV, who was an enigmatic character who may have followed his father or may have been a co-regent with him. If the latter, Amenemhet IV could well have been Moses. Amenemhet IV mysteriously disappeared off the scene before the death of Amenemhet III.

Amenemhet III had a daughter whose name was Sobekneferu. It is known that she had no children.6 If she was the daughter of Pharaoh who came down to the river to bathe, it is easy to understand why she was there. It was not because she had no bathroom in her palace. She would have been down there taking a ceremonial ablution and praying to the river god Hapi, who was also the god of fertility. Having no children she would have needed such a god, and when she found the beautiful baby Moses there she would have considered it an answer to her prayers (Exodus 2:5–6).

But when Moses came of age he identified himself with the people of Israel and was obliged to flee from Egypt. This left a vacuum on the throne, and when Amenemhet III died there was no male successor. Sobekneferu ascended the throne and ruled for 8 years as a Pharaoh, but when she died the dynasty died and was succeeded by the 13th dynasty.

And a little further on David Down identifies the last pharao to have a scarab in Kahun, Neferhotep I, with the Pharao of whom Moses demanded the release of Israelites.

According to Manetho, he was the last king to rule before the Hyksos occupied Egypt ‘without a battle’. Without a battle? Where was the Egyptian army? It was at the bottom of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:28). Khasekemre-Neferhotep I was probably the pharaoh of the Exodus. His mummy has never been found.

HGL
*HGL's F.B. writings : Disagreeing about age of flood. (et c)
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.fr/2012/10/disagreeing-about-age-of-flood-et-c.html

**I link to:
CMI : Searching for Moses by David Down
http://creation.com/searching-for-moses

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Appendix B : what about Kontiki Viracocha? Another Pagan calque of Christian figures?

If missionaries came to anywhere in Northern South America or Southern North America or Central America before Columbus, say in Roman times, and were not in the end followed by a population surviving to our times, the legend of Kontiki Viracocha alias Quetzalcoatl (which seems to be Aztek for Geek/Scholar or something) may be a distorted memory thereof.

As distorted as Dionysus from Moses or as Deukalion and Pyrrha from Noah et c.

The man is white and haas a beard. That would mean some kind of European or Mediterranean.

He orders human sacrifice to cease. That is one thing a Christian missionary would do.

His orders were not obeyed. This is what would have happened if a mission failed. And a failed mission would explain a persistent Paganism quite able to distort the story so as to leave out more specifically Christian parts, or so as to attribute what a missionary attributed to Christ to the memory of the missionary rather than that of the God-Man he came for./HGL